AMD Mantle Patch for Battlefield 4 Delayed to 2014.

Advanced Micro Devices and DICE said on Monday that the long-awaited patch for Battlefield 4 video game would be delayed. Instead of this month, the patch, which may speed up the title on AMD Radeon hardware, is now projected to be released sometimes in January. The two companies did not disclose reasons for the delay.

“After much consideration, the decision was made to delay the Mantle patch for Battlefield 4. AMD continues to support DICE on the public introduction of Mantle, and we are tremendously excited about the coming release for Battlefield 4! We are now targeting a January release and will have more information to share in the New Year,” the statement by AMD reads.

Mantle, a cross-platform application programming interface (that will only support Windows operating system initially) designed specifically for graphics processing units based on graphics core next (GCN) architecture, presenting a deeper level of hardware optimization. Being low-level API, Mantle can bypass all the bottlenecks modern PC/API architectures; according to AMD, Mantle enables nine times more draw calls per second than DirectX and OpenGL thanks to lower CPU overhead.

According to AMD and DICE (a fully-owned subsidiary of Electronics Arts), running games using Mantle API boosts rendering performance and can potentially enable higher-quality graphics. DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine – which powers Battlefield 4, Need for Speed Rivals and multiple other titles – has already been optimized for Mantle.

Two main purposes of Mantle are to speed up game performance on AMD hardware and possibly introduce exclusive visual effects. 3dfx Glide, proprietary API by 3dfx, served the same purposes over a decade ago, back in the 1990s. Nonetheless, AMD does not seem to want to compare Mantle to Glide. Moreover, AMD hopes that eventually Mantle will be an industrial standard.